Tag Archives: feature

What have you done with your GameCube aside from play games on it? Most people would say that’s all they did, but the dudes from the Nebula Vaping Lounge who were behind this awesome modded GameCube e-hookah can say that they at least smoked a few on theirs. E-hookahs and e-cigarettes are closely related, with the latter being such a hot topic these days.

In fact, my friends and I debated on the merits of e-cigs over our weekly Saturday brunch and things got heated pretty quickly (okay, enough with the puns!)

I’ve sure you’ve seen the clip above a few times before. It’s of a girl using her phone while walking in the mall. She’s completely oblivious as to where she’s headed that she falls into the foundation while texting. A lot of people get into accidents or scrapes because they pay more attention to their mobile phones instead of their surroundings.

Japanese cell phone provider DoCoMo wants to change that by adding a voluntary “safety mode” feature on their phones. The phone locks when it detects that the user is on the move and displays the following warning: “Using your smartphone while walking is dangerous. The phone senses you are walking. Please stop.”

If it’s an emergency and the user does need to use his phone while walking, he can tap the close button on the screen to use the phone for ten seconds, or hold down the power button to use the phone for five seconds.

If you’re in the process of planning a grand celebration for a grand event, then obviously invitations are at the top of your list. Because without invites, how can you get people to attend your event, much less let them know why you’re celebrating and where you’re going to be holding the festivities? It used to be that people simply went to a printing press to have their invitations printed. But in this day and age, people are getting more involved and more creative with their invites.

For example, ultimate geek couple Bill Porter and his wife (but then-fiance) Mara decided to do away with traditional embossed wedding invitations and bring out the circuit boards instead. They worked laboriously to print and assemble over 50 invites fitted with LED lights. The coolest part is that the lights flashed a secret message in Morse code when the sensors in the board detect decreased light levels. Pretty cool, huh?

For more awesome invites that were no doubt made for equally awesome parties, hit the break. You might get a few ideas for your own party in the process!

It’s no secret that women often put their comfort on the line, all in the name of fashion. Whether it’s sporting too-heavy headpieces or wearing sky-high platforms, there’s little that fashion obsessed women won’t do if it means getting a leg up on their equally trend-hungry peers.

For years, doctors have been warning women about the dangers of high heels on their ligaments–and, for years, women have been ignoring them. Designers are coming up with kookier designs by the season, and we’re showcasing a bunch of the weirdest and wackiest shoes that look like they might just make the wearer break a leg or two. If you thought the Mojito shoe was the height of shoe insanity, then think again, because there’s more.

It’s less than a week before Valentine’s–that dreadful day where it seems like there’s no pleasing your suddenly over-expectant girlfriend. There’s only one thing to do if she’s been bitten by the Valentine bug: give her a night to remember and a present she’ll treasure forever. Or until next year, that is, when you’ll have to do it all over again.

We’re well aware of the fact that every girl’s different, and that one woman’s treasure might be less of a gem in the eyes of another. With that in mind, we put this last-minute Valentine’s day gift guide together to give you a little nudge in the right direction so you can find the perfect present for your kinda girl.

Whenever awards are given from criteria that aren’t quantitative, it’s pretty easy to question their validity. The above illusion won the Best Illusion of The Year 2007 as sponsored by the Neural Correlate Society, and while it’s interesting, perhaps 2007 was just a slow year. Still, this is what was said:

These images of the Leaning Tower are actually identical, but the tower on the right looks more lopsided because the human visual system treats the two images as one scene. Our brains have learned that two tall objects in our view will usually rise at the same angle but converge toward the top—think of standing at the base of neighboring skyscrapers. Because these towers are parallel, they do not converge, so the visual system thinks they must be rising at different angles.

These optical illusions were discovered at Harvard, and demonstrate a phenomenon they’re calling silencing:

Play the movie while looking at the small white speck in the center of the ring. At first, the ring is motionless and it’s easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. But in reality they are changing the entire time. Take a look.

SILENCING demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance. Simply by changing the retinotopic coordinates—moving the object or the eyes—it is possible to silence awareness of visual change, causing objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.

Some of you may remember that Philips brought us to Amsterdam last year to witness the production of a musical piece titled “I’m No Prototype”. It was part of their Obsessed With Sound campaign and was meant to highlight the company’s commitment to excellence in audio products. As part of the campaign, they were also sponsoring a musical talent discovery competition. This effort led to the submission of over 1,400 entries and the selection of a winner. They got the chance to have their winning piece mastered by U2’s producer, Steve Lillywhite and the Metropole Orchestra from Amsterdam. The result is the video above, and the winning band is a group from Brazil called Inky. The piece is called “No One’s Town” and we happen to think it’s pretty darn awesome.

We’re doing a follow up on this not just to help spread the word on the company’s efforts, but also to make a short statement about the way music is being discovered these days. It’s a slow shift away from the traditional record label orchestrated path that artists have taken over the decades. With shows like American Idol, YouTube and now multinational-sponsored competitions, artists can be discovered in more ways than ever before. It doesn’t necessarily mean that being selected as a winner will sad to commercial success, as we don’t know if there’s a distribution arrangement in place for Inky. Still, exposure is something, and we applaud Philips’ efforts in this area.

You know, much as we love us our gadgets, there comes a time when we start noticing that comparing their thinness, drooling over their impeccable gloss, and counting the ways we can fold them simply reeks of estrogen. What ever happened to Mr. “I-ain’t-got-no-time-for-no-bandaids” Man? You think lumberjack Joe would be debating the usefulness of packing WiFi on his cell? We didn’t think so, and nor do the folks at DoubleViking. Check out their slightly short but hilarious piece on how to reattach your cellphone’s cojones back on.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.